Vettel's time was unbeatable - Rosberg

Nico Rosberg said he was surprised by Sebastian Vettel's advantage in qualifying for the Brazilian Grand Prix and that he couldn't have beaten the pole position time.

Having set the pace in both Friday practice sessions and not set a time in FP3, Rosberg was one of the favourites for pole position in the wet conditions at Interlagos. However, Vettel delivered two laps which were 0.6s quicker than Rosberg could manage and he admitted there was no possibility for him to match the Red Bull.

"It was a good day today, everything went to plan," Rosberg said. "It's always extremely tough in these conditions because it's all over the place and you need to make sure you don't get caught out. The whole team all did a good job and had a perfect strategy in the end doing those two consecutive laps on the inter. I got a good lap together so I'm happy with that.

"I am surprised by the gap to Sebastian - that's very big - so it definitely would have been difficult even getting everything perfect to come close to him, so that's fine. The optimum was second place and we got that so it's OK and it's a great place to start tomorrow on the front row of the grid."

One area Rosberg highlighted as costing him time was with the KERS usage on his strategy.

"I finished my KERS unfortunately for the last sector. That's just the compromise from doing two consecutive laps in these wet conditions so it was to be expected and we chose to do it that way, but for sure that cost some lap time so it was down to that."

With the race conditions unknown, Rosberg warned that there were a lot of potential gambles the team has had to take ahead of Sunday.

"There's a lot of other things like balance, like the front wing setting, your 7th gear; you might be on the limiter for 100 metres if you get it wrong. Your engine temperature is difficult to predict so you might have opened it too much and then you find tomorrow that you're running too cold and you lose performance. There's a lot of things like that."